A new Fourier Transform (NFT) approach is developed for the synthesis of shaped patterns radiated by linear antenna arrays. The proposed method exploits in an innovative way the FT relation between the source distribution and the radiated pattern. Precisely, the finite dimension of real sources is firstly taken into account by using the sampling theorem to approximate the desired pattern as a band-limited function. It is this step that allows one to obtain an important performance improvement. Then, a continuous source is evaluated from the approximate desired pattern to finally obtain the element excitations. Numerical examples validate the method.
